Alexei Panshin by Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow

Author:Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-29T23:58:41+00:00

I was unhappy about the check not coming, so I lit into the work with a vengeance, turning sod and earth. The ducklings, twice their Easter-morning size but still clothed in yellow down, went reep-a-cheep and peep-a-deep around my heels and gobbled happily when I turned up worms for their benefit. They knew there was someone looking out for their welfare. I was wishing I knew as much.

Spring this year was wet and late, and the only thing in bloom was the weeping willow in the back yard, with its trailing yellow catkins. The trees spread over the running hills to the next farm were still winter sticks. The day was cool enough for a light jacket in spite of the work, and the sky was partly overcast.

Gardening was an act of faith that the seasons would change and warmth and flower come. Gardening is an act of faith. I’m a pessimist, but still I garden.

It’s much like the times.

Our society is imperfect. That’s what we say, and we shrug and let it go at that. Societies change in their own good time, and there isn’t much that individuals can do to cause change or direct it. Most people don’t try. They have a living to make, and whatever energies are left over they know how to put to good use. They leave politics to politicians.

But let’s be honest. Our society is not just imperfect. Our society is an unhappy shambles. And leaving politics to politicians is proving to be as dangerous a business as leaving science to scientists, war to generals, and profits to profiteers.

I read. I watch. I listen. And I judge by my own experience.

The best of us are miserable. We all take drugs—alcohol, tobacco, and pills by the handful. We do work in order to live and live in order to work—an endless unsatisfying round. The jobs are no pleasure.

Employers shunt us from one plastic paradise to another. One quarter of the country moves each year.

No roots, no stability.

We live our lives in public, with less and less opportunity to know each other. To know anybody.

Farmers can’t make a living farming. Small businessmen can’t make a living anymore, either. Combines and monoliths take them over or push them out. And because nobody questions the ways of a monolith and stays or rises in one, the most ruthless monoliths survive, run by the narrowest and hungriest and most self-satisfied among us.

The results: rivers that stink of sewage, industrial waste, and dead fish. City air that’s the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Countryside turned to rubble. Chemical lagoons left to stain hillsides with their overflow. Fields of rusting auto bodies.

And all the while, the population is growing. Progress. New consumers. But when I was born, in 1940, there were 140 million people in this country, and now there are more than 200 million, half of them born since 1940. Our institutions are less and less able to cope with the growth. Not enough houses. Not enough schools.

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